Do fairy tales have a lot to answer for?

[poshsinglemum]

Do they perpetuate the myth that all of us women need to be rescued? Or are they harmless fun?

Lenin I believe that one of the biggest myths around is that women force men into marriage. It's a lie perpetuated by the media.
In real life, it's men who pressure women to settle down (and no wonder! MArried men rank highest in the happiness and well-being stakes)
BUt the media tells women there's nothing worse than being single

Don't get me started on fairy tales! I do agree that gender differences are important to children esp in preschool and early school years, as they work out who they are - and that they may be drawn to different things, BUT this means that unless you have kept your child in a hermetically sealed, TV / book / grandparent / friend free bubble since birth, you can't underestimate the power of conditioning - they want to identify with others of their gender, so the slightest hint that girls like this and boys like that is soaked up and internalised.

So I think the answer is YES (re the most popular and pervasive ones) if - as someone else suggested - they're not given as part of a varied diet. Especially for the many girls who grow up without a dad (ie a real life human man)in the household. several reasons including:

Unrealistic expectations of men in general (they are not heroes they are human just like us)

Idealisation of beauty, and even more sinister, that goodness is reflected in how people look (ie ugly people are wicked)

Girls need rescuing by charming princes from monsters / wicked stepmothers / oppressive patriarchs

Stepmothers are wicked and evil and want to get rid of you

The goal is marriage, once you've done that its 'happily ever after', job done. Bobbins, thats when the work really starts!! (see point one)

I try hard to give DD a balance and though she now has disney related books / videos (not here, at MILs with whom we fought a losing battle on this one..)She also has some great femail role models - there are a few websites that list some.

one of our favourites is 'Jane and the Dragon' - jane didn't want to be a lady in waiting, she wanted to be a knight, etc... there's a book and a DVD. Not at all po faced or serious, its fun and possibly appealing to boys too.

DD and I also try to think of lighthearted alternative resolutions to stories like:

?how else could rapunzel have escaped? how about if she cut her long hair off and made it into a rope to let herself down?
Or, ?why didn't sleeping beauty just set her alarm clock - imagine if i waited for Daddy to wake me up!! (Daddy is reknowned for his sleeping in prowess)

Sakura, it's just not true that men are pressuring women into marriage.

Nor that women are pressuring men, of course. Some people do - without a doubt. I can't see any generalisation to be made there, though, not really.

maybe so, Unprune, but you can make a generalisation about the portrayal of women in the media: desperate, sad and lonely if they're singe, and dying to get a man.

lol at your list dreamlady !

Yes, there is that stereotype, but then where would you get the idea that men are everywhere pressuring women into marriage? Just curious.

I think the mainstream - and let's face it, that just means Disney for the most part - fairy tales are very misogynistic and perpetuate a view that women should be beautiful, passive, and live only to get married.

To be fair though, I think there is a popular conception of fairy tales as being a lot "worse" in feminist terms than they actually are. I can't think of a single story that involves a woman being imprisoned in a tall tower guarded by a dragon, waiting for a prince to come and rescue her. Not one. Most of the stories are a lot more complicated than that.

Do agree that there is a problem with fairy tales ending in marriage, and GG's statement posted further up.

But I have read a LOT of fairy tales and always found a good mix of stories with men being heroic/bad and women being heroic/bad. Stories where women rescue men. And lots and lots and lots of stories where no-one marries anyone else at all. There are ghosts. Or magical animals. Or family strife. (Popular fairy tales that don't include people getting married include: Jack and the Beanstalk, Goldilocks, Hansel and Gretel etc)

If you get a book with a wider range of fairy tales then there are some great girl-friendly ones, with lots of heroic heroines. I always enjoyed the Black Bull of Norroway, Molly Whuppie, All Kinds of Fur, Tam Lin.

They all have horrible scary stuff in them though, but children usually like to be scared, as long as they know that they are safe.

Rapunzel is imprisoned in a tower guarded by the old woman and rescued by a prince (mind you, doesn't he go blind at some point? eek I can't remember).
Then there's Sleeping Beauty, imprisoned in the castle, asleep, 'guarded' by the maze of rose bushes, until the prince rescues her.

The Twelve Wild Geese

The Three Spinners

Sleeping Beauty does get woken with a kiss, but the only heroics on the prince's part is a bit of topiary . this is probably the closest I suppose.

Rapunzel though IIRC does not get rescued. The witch chucks the prince out of the window where his eyes get scratched by the thorns, and Rapunzel gets evicted from the tower. Later they bump into each other (perhaps literally in his case) and her tears restore his sight.

God I am doing so much googling for this thread

Thing is, I love fairy tales and feel that their depiction as harmful to girls is unfair. They are some of the oldest historical things we have, and they are the stories grandmothers and mothers told to the small children. They are like our epics. The women's version of Beowulf or the Odyssey. They amuse and teach lessons to children, and hardly any of those lessons are "be a good girl, sit still and wait to get married". Far more of "be nice to your parents", "if someone wants to kill you, do run away", "be kind to animals, old people and beggars", "use your brain to get where you want to go", and "what goes around, comes around".

Good article here which makes the point that most of the popular fairytales nowadays were published in books for children in the 19th century. Not surprising then that these more passive-princess stories were what was being peddled, out of the great tradition of folklore, as suitable for little girls of the Victorian era.

More horrifying, really, that they continue to be so popular today.

True nuff.

Great alternative fairy story by Eleanot Farjeon here. I don't know anything about her but she sounds interesting.

Aha yes I;d forgotten about Rapunzel meeting the prince. That certainly is an interesting one - lots going on there, isn't there? Getting thrown out for what, consorting with a man? And how she ended up there in the first place: because her parents took something from the old woman's garden when the mother was pregnant? What's the meaning of that?
(Just musing, really.)

And what is the significance of all the spinning?
Rapunzel spins skeins of silk for the old woman.
Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on a spinning wheel.
The ?miller's daughter has to spin straw into gold in Rumpelstiltzkin.

Is is as simple as, der, everyone spun in those days? ie not significant.

Well spinning was women's work, I suppose, wasn't it. So some of them are having to prove their (economic) worth before they are considered deserving of a husband. Maybe?

Wonder if the word "spinster" (i.e. spinner) to denote an unmarried woman tracks back through the ages/languages?

This is one of my favourite rants! I was determined that DD(3) would never see any Disney crap, etc, but she has them all.

dreamylady has, however, said everything I would normally say.

Spinster is definitely related to spinning.
Also distaff (as in the distaff side of a family tree) is a thing you hold unspun wool on while spinning (I think).
There are more.

Having said that, may I just point out that I think the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales are the worst. In particular, The Little Mermaid and The Red Shoes. Hate them.

I used to read loads of fairy tales when I was a child. There was a series of books which were things like "The Lilac Book of Fairy Tales", "The Red Book etc". May try to find them and see if they've got more obscure ones in them...

E&M, your mention of Eleanor Farjeon has unearthed some kind of "back of my mind" important thing and I now won't be able to rest until I've worked out what it is. It'll be that she wrote something I loved as a child so I've now got to track it down!

You are thinking of the Andrew Lang series of Fairy Tales, jingle.
mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/

HCA wrote some very weird Christian-influenced tales, heavy on Punishment for Bad Girls and Boys.

Angela Carter is interesting on the subject of fairy stories and their latent meanings. If you have time, this is well-worth a read: the Bloody Chamber

I have the same feeling about Eleanor Farjeon. Something about cats?